Samsung Galaxy Note 8 video hands-on

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 sits between the Galaxy Note 10.1 and the tremendously popular Galaxy Note 2, offering an 8-inch screen and all the key attractions of its brothers.

We took an up close and personal look at the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 at MWC 2013, where the tablet was officially launched. Watch the video below to see what it looks like in the flesh.

With an 8-inch screen, one of its closest rivals is the iPad mini, although the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 gets more and more different from Apple's smaller tablet the closer you look.

To start, the tablet has a white plastic body instead of a metal one. It shares this design style with many of Samsung's top-end phones and tablets, including the Samsung Galaxy S3 and, its big brother, the Galaxy Note 10.1

Much more important, though, is the Samsung Galaxy Note 8's top feature, a Wacom digitiser layer and S-Pen stylus combo. This lets you write with a virtual pen on the touchscreen, and offers pressure sensitivity - which you don't get with a standard capacitive touchscreen.

This offers an impressively natural-feeling handwriting experience, which is used most effectively by the dedicated note-taking app. It makes the Galaxy Note 8 a far better sketching tool than just about any other tablet.

Samsung Galaxy Note 8 specsLike the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, not all of the Note 8's features are all that cutting-edge. For example, the 8-inch screen only offers resolution of 1,280 x 800. That's the same number of pixels as you'll find in the bargain 7-inch Google Nexus 7.

As a result, the Samsung Galaxy Note 8 doesn't offer as sharp, smooth text and images as something like the Retina iPad. We hope that this will mean the tablet is fairly affordable - we're hoping for well under £300.

At a competitive price, the Galaxy Note 8 will make a pretty attractive gadget. It has a quad-core 1.6GHz Exynos 4412 processor - the same seen in the Galaxy S3, but clocked a little higher. It also offers expandable memory, with a microSD slot.

Oh, and it'll also function as a phone, although only clowns would be able to fit this "phone" in their pocket.